Failings of the Jedi Code
by Skypeanon
Summary: A brief character sketch of the "Hero With No Fear", set shortly after the battle of Geonosis.


Hey. This is the first piece of fanfiction I've written. Like it or hate it I would really REALLY appreciate it if you could review and tell me what to improve on.

*****NOTE***** The first person who reviews gets a short piece written for them about the character of their choice from Star Wars (within reason - I simply refuse to talk about the deep feelings of Jar-Jar).

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Anakin lay in the medcenter, simply staring at the arm which was to be his for the remainder of his life. _Attached perfectly, each movement I make smoothly executed: all in all, not bad workmanship_. The boy wiggled his wrist. He reached his left hand over to feel this new addition to his body, and marveled at how normal being a cripple could feel. For that is what he was: a cripple, the title adorned upon him as so many others had been in past years. A functional cripple, who knew not whether his injury was the losing of his arm, or the losing of his love. Anakin dropped his hand. Closing his eyes, he imagined his master telling him to "_Center himself, find a balance within the Force and come to terms with the situation." _Anakin scoffed. His _master _didn't know anything about it. _He_, Anakin, didn't care about the replacement of his arm.

But how could Padmé, how could one so, so _beautiful_, so gloriously human, ever love a machine?

At the familiar sound of a door sliding open Anakin tore his gaze and thoughts from the mechanical limb and watched as a human Jedi Master of around Obi-Wan's age stepped into the room.

"How are you feeling, Padawan?" she enquired of him with a somewhat concerned expression adorning her features. Anakin shrugged.

"Fine".

_This is not going to be pleasant. _He braced himself.

Many minutes of poking and prodding his new limb later and Anakin's arm felt, by his own observation, like it was going to come off. Again. He sighed, leaning his head back. How was he feeling? Had he not proudly held the position of a Jedi he would say "torn". Not angry. He supposed the anger and frustration would come later - it often did during the recovery process.

The boy knew he was not supposed to be feeling anger. It was even in the _code, _clear as the slash of red that separated body from limb.

"There is no emotion,

There is peace."

Anakin smiled, an insane urge to laugh overtaking him. He indulged himself, a high pitched utterance filled with the bitterness of regret escaping him. Jedi were supposed to be stronger than emotion, yet he had always felt like a slave within its grasp.

The boy had been the child of emotion since birth; of it's failed repression; of the futility of resisting the urge to let anger out; of how grief could be twisted back around and used as an institution to supply pain. Growing up on Tatooine, some part of the small sandy-haired child wished to break down and cry every night before sleep. The thought of waking up in the morning to nothing but monotony made him dread laying his head down and the fear that his whole life would be spend doing the same, useless things threatened to overwhelm him. The mornings were slightly better-Watto was not an unkind master, and the afternoons took on the drool sense of boredom in which Anakin desperately wished for evening. As night took over, and Anakin wanted nothing but to cry, he held his tears back and suppressed the emotion, for his mother, if not for himself.

In his youth he had been incredibly easy to provoke: all it took to anger him was one taunt from a seeming friend about how ugly C3PO was, or a sneer by a passerby at the pitiful slave-boy.

How he had hated being known as a slave! The title, accurate as it was, was nevertheless a crippling addition to his name. Some people were pilots, others fruit vendors. Some were Jedi, some were warriors, some's only purpose was do die at the extent of others. Anakin Skywalker was a slave. That was his title:

Anakin Skywalker,

Slave.

And he hated- oh how he loathed -that he had never truly come to accept that fate. He despised himself for hoping and dreaming and telling; telling others that he had ambitions: to be a pilot: to free his mother: to actually _live_, because, despite the excited tone in which he versed them, he believed that these ambitions could never come true.

Anakin pretended that he _could_ pretend he was normal, all those years ago on the desert-plane. He hated himself for pretending, but even more than that deep rooted anger he hated the slavery that had caused it.

It was that very hate, that desperate loathing, that had eventually showed him how very weak he was when it came to emotion. His mother: prior slave freed and married to Owen Lars, his first of many true attachments, was finally living the life of a free woman. However, as Anakin listened to Watto's assurances that his mom was currently married and free from a life of bondage, he felt that there was something not-quite-right about the notion that all was well. Anakin bit his lip, afraid.

_If anyone's laid a hand on her, I'll kill them._

And he did; not mercifully, not through the guidance of the Jedi Code, but violently slaughtered them one by one-caring not about the women, or the children as he drove his weapon through vital organs. He punished each and every one of the sand people for the look of his mother when he had stepped inside that tent. He slew them for a women who had managed to escape slavery but ended up once again confined in its grasp, wrists tied to the sand-packed walls of the vicious people's residence. He freed his mother: not literally, because she had been freed from true slavery when she met her husband, but from the last of her burdens- from the worry that her only son would never come back to her. And as he let her down from the wall and cradled her weak body in his arms, she told him that she was complete.

The boy's love for his mother turned to anger, to madness, to lust for bloodshed, for revenge. And while he was disposing of the vile beasts that had committed such a crime a small part of him cried that he was really only angry at himself, because he should have come sooner, sooner to free his mother from bondage, to help her have the life of freedom which they had never experienced, to control his anger. Sooner, but it was too late for Anakin to escape the slavery of his own actions.

Anakin was not too strong to be emotional; he had always known it to be true. He wished he was, desperately pleading for a way to change the past, but the fact remained.

As the boy looked at the metal of his new arm, he knew that he was enslaved forever.

He scoffed. _There __**is **__no freedom, no peace. There is only emotion._


End file.
